WORLD AFFAIRS
Agent of death
by S. CHATTERJEE
IT is impossible not to be personal. I remember April 30, 1975.
My laboratory partner rushed in, announcing: "There are celebrations.
Vietnam is liberated." May Day had never been so intense
and joyful as the next day. In this year's May Day I saw the same
picture that I had seen 30 years ago, of a Vietnamese soldier
piloting his tank to the abandoned United States Embassy. This
30th anniversary was no less joyful but there was also a reminder
of the U.S. barbarism when I learnt of a meeting in Paris of the
Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.
The story of Agent Orange must begin with the British experiment
of using defoliants in South-East Asia in the campaign against
communist guerillas in Malaya in the 1950s. Defoliation, it was
noted, served very important military purposes. Firstly, the trees,
when defoliated, do not grow leaves and deprive the guerilla of
the hideout and subsistence like fruits. More important, it destroys
the economy of the countryside, on which the guerilla depends
for political contacts and protection.
Agent Orange found its way into the battlefield as a sequel to
this British success. Different defoliants derive their names
from their colour and contain the highly toxic chemical dioxin.
In 1959, the U.S. Department of Defence (DoD) conducted its first
field experiments in Camp Drum in New York, using Agent Purple,
with an "optimal" bombardment of three litres an acre.
Although the next field tests, in South Vietnam, were a part of
the DoD programme, they were code-named Farmgate
- implying agricultural objectives, where the military intentions
were camouflaged.
The first field trials in South Vietnam were conducted in August
- September 1961. In September - November 1962, large shipments
of Agent Purple and Agent Blue arrived there, while Agent Orange
was put to use between 1965 and 1971. The South Vietnamese authorities
were either kept ignorant or were willing collaborators of the
Americans. In the harbours, these chemicals were always unloaded
manually, which meant that there was the danger of the containers
developing cracks and the chemicals spilling over. The task of
aerial spraying of these lethal chemicals was also given to civilian
pilots, who became the victims of the herbicides that they sprayed.
Dioxin poisoning is highly carcinogenic and can lead to 28 fatal
diseases. Being easily dissolved by fat and being an extremely
stable carcinogen, dioxin can be transferred through the placenta
to the embryo and to later generations. It can also enter the
body through fish, meat and dairy products. This is one of the
ways many veterans contacted the poison, while this route of entry
is still unabated amongst Vietnamese citizens, even 30 years after
the spraying. In fact, in the event of dioxin poisoning, it takes
many years, sometimes 25-30 years, for the symptoms to develop.
The cost of treatment is also prohibitive - the dioxin test alone
costs about $1,000. That is why the problem snowballed into a
crisis in the mid-1980s, when 300,000 U.S. veterans of the Vietnam
War reported symptoms that could be linked
The horror can be imagined from the fact that Vietnam has lost
500,000 persons in dioxin contamination and 650,000 are already
identified with several forms of physical and mental deformities
that can be identified with dioxin. The total number of people
directly exposed to dioxin by spraying alone was estimated to
be 4.2 million, in a total population of 40 million, at that time.
The numbers affected by later contaminations is difficult to ascertain.
This war crime in Vietnam clearly has its roots in the American
military and political bosses' complete disregard for human life.
When the effects of Agent Orange came to be known, 5,000 U.S.
scientists, of whom 17 were Nobel laureates and 129 were members
of the Academy of Sciences, demanded withdrawal of chemical agents
in warfare. No heed was paid, because the U.S. industry had geared
up for the kill and here was a chance to put in action a "permanent
war economy", which could be "bolstered with military
orders". Chemical warfare was a part of the plan.
The biggest beneficiary in chemical bombing was the multinational
company Monsanto, which has been identified by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency as a potentially responsible party for dumping
hazardous chemicals in as many as 93 dumping sites. The discussions
between the company and the U.S. Army on matters related to the
use of dioxin in battlefield are still classified as secret documents.
This must also act as a warning to India as the company now has
a laboratory in the Indian Institute of Science while its Bt cotton
experiments have wreaked havoc with farmers in several parts of
India.
The Vietnamese have for long complained about this diabolic aggression
against humanity. Their investigations are never published in
Western scientific journals, and the Western press gives them
no coverage. Many cases would have remained unrecorded but for
an intervention by a top military man, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a
former commander of the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, who had lost his
son (a soldier) owing to dioxin poisoning, suffered in Vietnam.
This raised an uproar and resulted in various studies, of which
the latest (Nature; Stellman et al. April 17, 2003) gives
a new estimate of the total amount of dioxin sprayed, which is
several fold more than what was believed until now. From studies
of the log books of pilots and the census data for 20,000 Vietnamese
villages, they found that 3,000 villages were hit directly and
between two and four 4 million lives were affected.
The most startling revelation concerns the total amount of dioxin
sprayed, in the mangroves of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Vietnamese
have for long tried to focus world attention on the destruction
caused in their country. A small baby talcum powder box containing
80 grams of dioxin, they tell the world, can destroy all the citizens
of New York (seven million), if put in the water supply of the
city. According to the 1974 estimate of the National Academy of
Sciences (U.S,), Vietnam was sprayed with 101-163 kg of dioxin.
The recent studies corrected this figure to be 366 kg, capable
of killing 25,366.3 million people. Their estimate thus scales
up the earlier estimate by a factor of 2.2-3.6. According to the
National University of Vietnam the amount of dioxin actually amounted
to 600 kg.
Thus the ability to kill and the economics of killing made Agent
Orange the choice. The effects are for all to see: particularly
now, when the third generation of veterans are showing a 70 per
cent to 300 per cent increase in cases of leukaemia. In Vietnam
the topsoil has to be dredged up on a scale that would amount
to 10 per cent of the country's land area. In many places dioxin
would have penetrated to a depth of seven feet below the topsoil
and may remain active for 20 to 30 years.
Whose duty is it to do this restoration? The answer is clear:
the ones who caused the damage must repair it too. But that would
need a change in the mindset of U.S. policy-makers, a departure
from the way they have treated the Bhopal gas victims. A quote
from Colin Powell may be worthwhile. In his February 5, 2003,
speech, made as the U.S. Secretary of State he told the United
Nations Security Council: "No country in the history of chemical
warfare has had more battlefield experience with chemical weapons
since the First World War than Saddam Hussein's Iraq." No,
Powell was being modest. That distinction truly belongs to the
U.S.
In Vietnam, Guernicas were enacted in thousands - in My Lai,
in Quang Tri, in Quang Ngai and in many other places. The enemy
invested 500 pounds of bombs on every citizen of Vietnam and yet
lost the war. The war was lost by America even as it started,
as the U.S. had to fight every single citizen of Vietnam, who
had a stake in national independence and the experiments in socialism
that were taking place in every rice field, factory, school, college
or cooperative. The Vietnamese proved their redoubtable Premier
Pham Van Dong's prophecy: "B-52s and computers cannot compete
with a just cause and human intelligence." The guerillas
refused to die (it cost half a million dollars to kill a guerilla
and in one case the Americans lost 99 planes, costing half a billion
dollars to destroy one bridge) and the American ratings declared:
" I ain't have no quarrels with the Viet Cong."
General Westmoreland's demands for more troops could thus not
be met either economically or politically. The tiny land called
Vietnam echoed with the words of its great leader, Ho Chi Minh,
who "preferred to sing, even though sorrows were enough to
make you weep." The song was:
Our mountains will always be,
our rivers will always be,
our people will always be;
The American invaders defeated,
we will rebuild
Our land ten times more beautiful.
Thus proving Rabindranath Tagore's assertion, in his moving indictment
of imperialism: "And some day the invincible spirit of
man in its victory march will surmount all obstacles, to win back
human dignity for mankind... the vanity of power is not secure,
even for the mightiest of the mighty: the day has come to show
this to the world." Vietnam did precisely that.
|